Imagined Movements Can Alter Our Brains

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Imagined movements can alter our brains

The interdisciplinary study examined the influence of two different types of BCI on the brains of test subjects with no prior experience of this technology. The first subgroup was given the task of imagining that they were moving their arms or feet, in other words a task requiring the use of the brain's motor system. The task given to the second group addressed the brain's visual center by requiring them to recognize and select letters on a screen. Experience shows that test subjects achieve good results in visual tasks right from the outset and that further training does not improve these results, whereas addressing the brain's motor system is much more complex and requires practice. In order to document potential changes, test subjects' brains were examined before and after each BCI experiment using a special visualizing process -- MRT (magnetic resonance tomography).

"We know that intensive physical training affects the plasticity of the brain," says Till Nierhaus of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Plasticity refers to the brain's ability to alter depending on how it is used. Scientists distinguish here between functional plasticity, where changes only occur in the intensity of the signals between the individual synapses, and structural plasticity. Structural plasticity refers to a change in nerve cells or even the forming of new nerve cells. "We asked ourselves if these impacts on the brain's plasticity would also occur in purely mental BCI experimental tasks, in other words if test subjects only think of a task without actually performing it," says Carmen Vidaurre, researcher at the Public University of Navarre.

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